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Getting out of our comfort zones

We all love our comfort zones don’t we? I have often taken the anything for an easy life route in my life, and at time that is the right thing to do – you can’t live on the edge all the time after all!

Right now, though, we are all out of our comfort zone one way or another. It can be scary, stressful and exhausting (it certainly is for me), but I am still here, still going and so are you. So that proves that you can cope outside your comfort zone, and so can I. It’s a bit like learning to swim by being thrown in at the deep end isn’t it – but I am sure we are all learning new things about ourselves at the moment and realising that we are a lot more resilient than we imagine.

So there is another positive that we can all take from this difficult time. I think most of us know that to progress with our lives or our businesses we need to keep pushing ourselves, keep trying new things and step outside our comfort zone at least some of the time. I don’t think this will ever get easy for me, but it definitely gets less difficult the more I do it.

Sometimes you have to try something new to know if you have a natural talent for it. I have never, ever ridden a horse and I don’t particularly want to do so. But if I had tried I could have discovered that I was the most naturally gifted jockey that ever lived. Probably not at my height and weight but you never know.

I do believe that if you have always wanted to try something in particular, you may sense that you have a talent for it. In any case, trying anything new with enthusiasm is always more likely to lead to success than trying it reluctantly. But if you never try it, you will never know.

At the moment I am sending out pitches to companies I hope may be interested in my copywriting every day. This is not a comfortable experience for me at all. I do not enjoy promoting myself or talking my skills up – I am much more comfortable with sarcastic self-deprecation. But I really, really want to make a career as a writer, and to do that I need clients. So I have to keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone and pitch, even though there is a part of me that expects the people I am contacting to laugh me, get angry with me or goodness knows what else in response. It is hard, but it is getting (a bit) easier every day.

So follow your dream. It won’t happen unless you take that first or next step, and it probably won’t be comfortable. But you owe it to yourself to try.

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